Baghdad Crackdown Seeks Sunni Help

Militants check a map in the city of Buhriz, 60 kilometers (35 miles) north of Baghdad, Wednesday, June 13, 2007. Local militants took over the control of the town and vowed to fight al-Qaida. U.S. commanders, trying to seize upon a successful trend born in western Iraq's Anbar province, have started arming and training Sunni men across a vast stretch of the country including Baghdad and extremely violent, al-Qaida-infested regions north and south of the capital. (AP Photo) (Str - AP)

With U.S. approval and help, the residents said, as many as 25 al-Qaida members were killed in two days of fighting.

"Sunni citizens of Amariyah that have been previously terrorized by al-Qaida are now resisting and want them gone. They're tired of the intimidation that included the murder of women," Lt. Col. Dale C. Kuehl, the battalion commander responsible for Amariyah, told AP at the time of the fighting.

Residents told AP the Wataniyoo Baghdad force is led by a man in his 30s who is known as Abu Abed. He was said to have been a Special Forces major in Saddam's military. Four of his brothers reportedly were killed by Shiite militiamen in western Baghdad's Iskan neighborhood over the past year.

But solid numbers that measure casualties over the past four months point toward discouraging trends for Washington.

The average daily U.S. death toll nationwide has climbed, from an average of 2.88 troops each day for the four-month period before Feb. 14 to a daily average of 3.22 since the operation began, according to the AP count.

And President Bush has warned that the summer will be "bloody" for American forces as they are increasingly exposed to militant attacks during more frequent patrols and move into less-fortified neighborhood bases.

The death toll among Iraqi civilians, military and police around Iraq has dipped marginally when comparing figures for the four months before the security drive. The four-month death toll before the operation was 7,919 while the number for the past four months was 7,281, according to the AP count.

The pre-operation period, however, included the particularly deadly months of October through December last year, violence that in part led Bush to order more troops sent to Iraq.

In the statistical credit column for the security operation, deaths in Baghdad dipped to 3,764 in the period since Feb. 14, as compared to 5,585 in the four-month period preceding the crackdown. But killings linked to Sunni-Shiite showdowns outside the capital have risen.

In some of these areas, American forces and Iraqi officials also are pressing a similar project of outreach to Sunni fighters.

The U.S. military said in a statement Sunday that it brought together government officials and 130 tribal leaders in the Salahuddin provincial capital, Tikrit, Saddam's hometown. The statement, which quoted Lt. Col. Mark Edmonds, deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit in the area, said the local officials and tribal leaders reached a "historic" agreement to fight al-Qaida.

A key battleground is the volatile Diyala Province northeast of the capital _ where many al-Qaida insurgents took refuge from the Baghdad security sweeps and Sunni vigilantes in Anbar.

Yaha Dira'a, a Shiite lawmaker from the area, said the Iraqi government recently sent $500,000 to local officials as seed money to encourage Diyala tribesmen to rally their young men to fight al-Qaida.

An AP reporter in Baqouba, the Diyala province capital, said the Americans paid members of the Islamic Army and 1920s Revolution Brigade, both Sunni insurgent organizations, about $250 each to man roadblocks against al-Qaida infiltration in the past month.

A Sunni tribal leader in Diyala said the U.S. soldiers came to him a month ago and asked him to tell his men to fight against al-Qaida and the Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The leader spoke to AP on condition of anonymity because he was speaking negatively about an American offer.

He said his fellow tribesmen met among themselves and decided to tell the Americans they would cooperate when, in fact, they would not. They then took a truckload of Russian-made Kalashnikov automatic rifles and ammunition from the Iraqi army with U.S. military approval and melted back into the population.